About the Author

Dallas Wiebe (1930-2008) graduated with degrees in English from Bethel College (1954) and the University of Michigan (M.A., 1955; Ph.D., 1960). After teaching at the University of Wisconsin, he taught literature and creative writing from 1963 to 1995 at the University of Cincinnati, where he founded the Cincinnati Poetry Review. Wiebe’s first novel was Skyblue the Badass (Doubleday/Paris Review Editions, 1969). In 1997 he published his explicitly Mennonite novel, Our Asian Journey (MLR Editions Canada). His short stories appeared in major journals, including the Paris Review. In 1978 he won the Aga Khan Fiction Prize from the Paris Review and the next year a Pushcart Prize. Burning Deck Press published four volumes of his stories: The Transparent Eye-Ball (1982), Going to the Mountain (1988), Skyblue’s Essays (1995), and The Vox Populi Street Stories (2003). Collections of his poems include minimalist works in The Kansas Poems (Cincinnati Poetry Review Press, 1987) and Christian explorations in On the Cross: Devotional Poems (DreamSeeker Books/Herald Press, 2005). The poems appearing in this issue of CMW are from Monument: Poems on Aging and Dying (Sand Hills Books), published the year he died.